I wonder if Point Roberts is … even more checkpoint fucked than usual…
https://wheninyourstate.com/washington/13-surprising-facts-about-point-roberts-washington/
Red line is the intl border, Peace Arch is just north of Blaine…
Yep, Point Roberts is a dangling peninsula.
…
Looks like the tariffs have not been fun:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/point-roberts-washington-trump-trade-war-canada-impact/
This is bullshit.
I demand HBO Maxine.
They missed ‘be’
Its sure to be historical…
Valve has a long track record of collaborating with and sometimes even hiring very talented modder groups/individuals.
In this instance, the Black Mesa team’s work has been so high quality and very much faithful to the original work (HL1) that they were allowed to actually commercially sell their mod, originally built in the HL2 engine, as its own game, sort of making it an … officially ssnctioned, unofficial remaster/remake of HL1.
In particular… the Black Mesa team essentially completely reworked and expanded all the Xen levels of HL1… these were always seen as kind of rough, rushed, not as well executed as the rest of the levels of the original HL1, at least by many fans…
Black Mesa originally just wasn’t even going to do the Xen levels, because they were so wildly different than the others, and when it originally released as just a mod, and also I think the first commercial release… it didn’t have the Xen levels.
People generally thought that that version of Black Mesa was pretty good, but janky and rough ariund the edges… Source as an engine was undergoing some radical reworking at about that same time, as it was evolving from the HL2 source engine into the L4D2, Portal 2, etc, Source engine…
… and eventually, after a long time of figuring out exactly what feature set they’d need to portray a truly remastered ‘Xen’, and reworking the whole game to run on the required Source features and framework… Black Mesa was finally able to do the big, giant, total overhaul, with the Xen levels, in 2020.
I know much of this because I used to occasionally chat with some members of the earlier mod team way back in the day, some of them would experiment with stuff in Garry’s Mod and start threads on Facepunch, before Garry nuked the forums.
If you’re interested in other fairly high quality, but not as expansive HL2 mods, I suggest Minerva.
Very, very good level design… I think Valve actually hired the guy that made that mod at some point.
Fedi-Overflow?
Stackiverse?
Pretty much.
This is what the Republicans have wanted for decades, they’ve just also been largely lying about not being this craven or extreme for decades.
I come from a right wing household, was raised listening to Rush Limbaugh on the AM radio all the time.
The base has always been like this, the people on top, funding and puppeting the base, have also always been like this.
The mask is just off now.
Trump just gave them all permission to stop pretending they gave a fuck about making sense or pretending to give a shit about any principles.
It literally just is ‘first the Dems get a Black President, and then they ask us to wear masks in a pandemic?’
Too much, the hard core rightoid loses their mind at this point, and just wants everything to burn.
Of course it doesn’t help that neoliberal capitalism has been disenfranchising everyone for decades, but the base Republican voter is way way way too stupid, or horrendously misinformed to know what those words mean.
My head canon is that Satoshi Nakamoto…
… is Hideo Kojima.
Anyway, Satoshi is the pseudonym used on the original… white paper, design doc, whatever it was, for Bitcoin. There’s no doubt about that, I was there back before even Mt. Gox became a bitcoin exchange, on the forums discussing it.
I thought it was a neat idea, at the time… and then I realized 95% of the discussions on that forum were about ‘the ethics of fully informed ponzi schemes’ and such, very little devoted to actual technical development… realized this was probably a bad omen.
How is a legacoin different from … just being a fancy NFT?
An all inuclusive, total body mind soul detox cleanse, vacation get-away trip.
Yeah wow great.
What a goddamn headline.
Oh no its fine you see, flying through an actively radioactive cloud/plume is uh… uh, maybe, technically allowable, therefore perfectly safe =D
Holy dear lord this species is actively Great Filtering itself in realtime, what an era to be alive in.
… and your choice of either topped with cheese wiz, or a single slice of american kraft ‘cheese’ melted over the whole thing.
Which uh… which exact piece of media is that?
There is so much Batman and related stuff… I don’t even know if you’re referring to a comic or a tv show or an animated movie or what.
Its pretty much like, ok, so we run Gotham, but we decided to go all in on this Joker guy… and he just burned down our bales of cash we can’t keep in any banks.
But we can’t… acknowledge… that we invested all our funds into the obviously crazy person… otherwise we look stupid.
This is unironically Soviet levels of unnacountability and corruption.
We’ve got the purges going on as well, notably with Hegseth basically firing all the top military brass.
… Shallow end of the pool with a goddamned diaper on…
Yeah, ‘aerial battle’ would have been the term I used, but hey since when are journalists supposed to know what words mean?
I suppose it is technically possible there could have been some actual close range dog fighting in this giant battle, lots of jets involved still have actual guns, as well as less long ranged and less accurate missiles…
On the other hand:
Holy fuck.
125 aircraft engaged in essentially one gigantic battle?
That is totally unprecedented in the modern era.
The only things I can think of that come close to that scale are uh… Desert Shield in the Gulf War, but that was massively one sided in the US’s favor, we pretty much completely surprised the Iraqi Air Force and destroyed most of their aircraft while they were on the ground…
I can’t think of any like… post jet aircraft era battle that involves more than 50 aircraft at the same time in the same battle.
Ok, had to look this up: ‘Black Friday’ in the Korean War, jets, but no missiles… the Battle of El Mansoura, Israel v Egypt 1973, involved around 200 total aircraft, Operation Mole Cricket B, Israel v Syria 1982, again about 200 total aircraft… and thats basically it.
So, uh, anyway… Pakistan and India both have nukes, and as best I can tell, both have threatened to use them is things escalate… so… uh… yeah…
Apparently there is a cease fire, apparently Trump is taking credit for it, apparently it has already been violated?
I am watching India Today’s livestream and they are currently saying Pakistan has and is currently still violating the ceasefire, and I have little doubt the Indians are as well.
EDIT: Former Indian Secretary MEA is basically saying Trump’s ‘ceasefire’ is complete bullshit, that India and Pakistan reached their own ceasefire, and though it seems like its falling apart, the other point here is that neither Pakistan nor India are paying any attention to Trump, they have no idea what he is talking about, they have not agreed to anything mediated by the US.
Just to give some context here:
US Dockworkers (Longshoremen) are not all in the same Union.
The West Coast and Hawaii are ILWU.
The Gulf and Atlantic Coasts are ILA.
The ILWU came out heavily against Trump before the election, endorsing Kamala.
The ILA on the other hand… basically decided to time their most recent strike with the latter stages of the 2024 campaign, snubbed Biden on multiple occasions, openly praised Trump on many occasions, both before and after he was elected…
… though I don’t think they formally endorsed Trump, its fairly clear which horse they backed.
Teamsters, on the other hand, represent… road maintenance workers, truck drivers, train operators, railway maintenance workers, construction workers, newspaper workers, police, warehouse workers… after over a century of union mergers, their represented industries are much more broad.
And they didn’t formally endorse anyone, but uh yeah, similar to the ILA, its very, very clear that leadership prefers Trump.
I mean, you joke, kind of, but a massive, MASSIVE amount of QAnon bullshit that drives current rightwingers in the US is literally nothing but inventing fake demonic pedophile cults and putting anyone they don’t like in these made up cults…
All so that they can demonize others, and what this functionally does is give these nutjobs an infinite well of whataboutisms to either shift a conversation about pederasty and child abuse in any christian church/sect … over to ‘the even worserer badderer people’…
…or just do something akin to a ‘no true scotsman’ and claim that anyone in any church who is a pedo or child abuser… well actually they’re not a real christian, they’re a secret demonic cult member who is embedded in the organization to both commit evil and also to discredit the church when they are exposed.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do.
These people invented what is essentially their own new religion, a religion dlc, which entirely serves as a mechanism to avoid and make impossible discussions of actual child sa, abuse, going on in the institutions they revere.
With nuclear weapons.
Mutually Assured Destruction.
I occasionally watch both vaush and hasan segments on youtube, along with many other lefitst youtubers.
vaush doesn’t do debates anymore, hasn’t done one in… over a year at this point, almost two years?
I’ve heard him explain a few times now that debating anybody with hardcore right wing views is less than unproductive at this point, as none of those people are any kind of capable of arguing in good faith, thus all you’re doing is platforming them.
also vaush is routinely quite critical of authoritarian regimes.
hasan, on the other hand, yeah, i agree, he has (at least initially? not sure if his stance has changed since) defended the russian occupation of crimea, he has platformed people that go waaay beyond being just anti-zionist and go all the way into general antisemitism, basically played defense for the Chinese government’s actions against uyghurs…
he’s much closer to a tankie, and tankies are what hexbear has a whole lot of, those are the rabid posters and mods you stereotypically get there.
So… I am confused as to how you would say hexbear loves both vaush and hasan, when … rabid hexbears basically are tankies… and would generally agree with hasan (or think he doesn’t go far enough), and despise vaush.
… Has anybody rewritten California Uber Alles for this piece of shit, and covered it?